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Less than half of Parents happy to discuss family situation with the BossA UK study, conducted by Bright Horizons and Working Families, revealed that less than half of working parents feel confident discussing family-related issues with their employer. Some of the key findings included:

Parents want dependable childcare, and would make sacrifices to get it. Women in particular are having to think carefully as they consider promotion opportunities because of childcare issues.

There is a clear role for employers to be more involved in the provision of childcare. Childcare breakdown is a significant issue, and has high work impacts in terms of disruption

Parents are putting in extra hours just to get the job done. This is a combination of work pressure, jobs growing too large to be done within ‘normal’ hours and workplace cultures that still value presenteeism and long hours. Fathers are putting in the longest hours.

Family is the highest priority for parents, whilst work is lower. Policy makers and employers should recognise this reality: working with the grain of parents’ values is likely to create happier, more effective employees. Practices like long hours and presenteeism, although believed to be productive, may have negative effects if they conflict with values about family life.

Fathers appear to be more involved. For example, young fathers are dropping off at school in greater numbers (and more frequently than mothers in the under 25 age group). However, fathers generally are more resentful towards their employers about their work and family balance, and this is more pronounced in younger fathers. Younger fathers are more involved with their children, and want to be even more involved but are finding workplace culture is out of sync with this.

Poor leadership prompts third of staff to leave job, research reveals‘Poor manager relationship’ has been cited as one of the top reasons employees would consider changing employers in a Towers Watson Global Workforce Study. According to the research, a third of managers do not coach employees on how to grow in their role, and a quarter fail to accurately evaluate performance in personal development reviews.The study, which covered more than 32,000 employees, suggested that managers also fall short when it comes to communication, with only a third of leaders involving employees in the decisions that affect them.

Although staff recognise the challenges managers face in doing their job – 37% said their manager didn’t have enough time to handle the people aspects of management. When managers were asked the same questions, many said they were not being empowered in their role to deliver effective management. Just half of managers said the information they needed to update their team on key organisational changes was readily available to them.